Comments on: the Live Journal sale as something more than corporate transaction

By: James

James — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:34:47 +0000

SUP’s role for the past 12 months has not been “in control”, but only for marketing and support with no access to the content database. The problem with the censoring that SA has done is that it’s been completely ad-hoc with no clear guidelines (or they contradict their own policies).

By: alex

alex — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:26:26 +0000

Wait… so let me get this straight. You are:
1. complaining that Six Apart has been heavily censoring LJ; but
2. think that the SUP buyout will be bad the LJ community, despite the well-known fact that
3. SUP has done virtually no censorship in its part of LJ for the 12 months that it has been in control?

Hello, logic?

By: sniping.org » Blog Archive » In Soviet Russia, LiveJournal Blogs on You!

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:25:12 +0000

[...] are. I was expecting him to speak up on this issue, and am glad to have his input. Luis Villa also throws in his thoughts, as well as the thoughts of a former coworker of his. Luis knows his way around law, free [...]

By: Tao of Foo: Sweet!

Tao of Foo: Sweet! — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:08:48 +0000

[...] didn’t know that today would be the day when I show up on Planet Gnome and Planet Fedora in naught but my undies. [...]

By: Luis

Luis — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:50:32 +0000

Icon: seriously. (Limited to CC-BY and CC-SA, of course. :)

By: James

James — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:40:21 +0000

I posted a few comments on this at Burningbird - the main point was SixApart proved unable to manage the LJ community, having bought it for the tech. And they couldn’t even get the tech right - journals were recently restricted to 1000 tags for performance reasons, which will have a huge affect on community journals.

The buyout was the tipping point for my friend Grahame to switch - he exported his journal with LJ archive (there’s a perl script, but it wasn’t as good) into a wordpress install http://grahame.angrygoats.net/blog/ He’d been wanting to switch for some time due to the content censorship earlier this year, but hadn’t wanted to use wordpress for quality reasons.

By: Mr. Icon

Mr. Icon — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:35:33 +0000

Seriously, you found that by searching for “russia you?” 8)

By: Luis

Luis — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:43:16 +0000

No offense taken, since your solution implies even more lawyerly job creation than the current situation. :) I do agree that legislation will likely end up being part of the cure here- we likely won’t be able to bootstrap ourselves like we did with the GPL.

By: Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:40:10 +0000

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they can’t sell Office to someone and then retroactively turn over all your documents to the new KGB.

They can with Hotmail, though.

While this isn’t a popular answer in some circles, the correct long-term answer to this is not “open protocols”, which provide an escape route but no damage limitation. It’s to stop allowing software startups and IP lawyers (no offense) to treat software-as-a-service as an inherently different sort of thing from any other service, like banks or utility companies. Your contract with your blog provider should be much, much firmer than a EULA hosted on the company website.

- Chris

By: Luis

Luis — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:38:36 +0000

Greg: yup. See also my thinking on openservices generally.